Market Stats

You see these guys. Out here telling you the best three stocks historically from November 5th through November 19th if the air pressure in the eastern hemisphere is less than .6 standard deviations above normal and there’s an election in Norway. You can leave it out on the curb, along with the rest of the “content marketing” flotsam and jetsam that never makes anyone a dime but aids the media in coming up with clickable headlines.

The punchline is not that someone is sitting with an excel sheet open carrying out these data-mining operations each day, although that’s pretty funny in and of itself. The real punchline is that, in the modern era, there are actually people managing money – actual money that someone else earned, killing themselves for decades in a real job – based on this premise.

And we call it AI. Or quantimental. It’s a joke.

This guy, talking about my beloved New York Giants’ offensive struggles this year, captures it better than I can: